ABSTRACT
Children, especially young children or those with disabilities, are frequently excluded as grievers. A child's grief may be minimized when strong relationships forged by the child are not considered significant. In Western society, rules regarding appropriate grieving and mourning customs are generally limited to the death of a close family member, regardless of the attachment. In reality, the bond between the bereaved and the deceased is a primary factor in determining the intensity of the grief, whether or not the loss involves next of kin. An underdeveloped area of research is the disenfranchised grief experienced by children following the loss of a baby sibling as a result of perinatal death during pregnancy, at birth, or within 1 year after birth. Building on the work of K. Doka, J. Kauffman identified self-disenfranchised grief as a form of grief precipitated by the bereaved individual rather than social forces.
